Afternoon Nap
“Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.”
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― Heraclitus
Lost for words, since my written journals of the period are sparse and perfunctory, I’m left with a couple of 35mm contact sheets and corresponding negatives from the winter of 1983.
Snow-covered fields bisected by fences, mountains under a lowering sky, water droplets in a stainless steel sink, flash-lit frames of a caving adventure, portraits of my daughter, then 8-years-old, and my nephew, 2-months new: glimpses of memory, lit by the low winter sun.
And the photograph represented above, made in Peter Fenn’s cabin, near Ashcroft, British Columbia: a picture of repose. The cold winter light, amplified by a blanket of snow beyond the cabin walls, mediated, I fancy, by the windowsill angel, casts a warming spell over the dreamers.
Later that year, under the summer sun, I photographed Peter again — this time with my Mamiyaflex medium-format camera. My girlfriend at the time, a hair stylist, was cutting Peter’s hair. Overhead, jet fighters from the Abbotsford Air Show screamed through the blue sky …. Peter’s muscular back, flecked with clippings.
On the same property, home of my sister and brother-in-law, we held a barn dance and art exhibition that summer — Talking Heads, David Bowie, Police (I still have the party tape); Peter’s rural drawings (including the one seen in “Afternoon Nap”) hung alongside the first of my Vancouver urban series, which I’d just begun.
“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant
Just as my trip back to England last year drove home (literally) the power of the photograph to evoke memory and to comfort the bereaved, again this month a fleeting moment illuminated on film serves as a kind of talisman, if not against mortality, then as a rage against the dying of the light.
In memoriam, Peter Fenn — 1944-2017